A PA Habit

Early on in my PA days I had a habit of thinking about the latest problem to come up (often other people's) and thinking about what I could have done before to prevent them. As it happens, there have been less and less problems that I feel like I could have prevented.

For one thing, I'm a better PA now than I was before, but that's just part of the explanation.

When I looked back, most of the ways I found to hypothetically prevent problems was to tell the people above me about potential problems before they developed.


Now, alerting people above me to potential problems is a tricky thing. Under the wrong circumstances or handled in the wrong way, it could be interpreted as telling someone above me (and when I'm a PA, everyone is above me) how to do their job.

Part of being a good PA is knowing what falls in someone else's area of responsibility from the beginning. The tricky part, for me anyway, is to tell someone once that there's a potential problem and then leave it to them to deal with it in their own way. After all, they may know something I don't know, like that there are other, more important things for both of us to be dealing with.

Taking ownership of problems is tricky, and I'm still mastering it.

The other reason I'm finding less problems I could have prevented is that I now understand that even if I had done everything right before, often a lot of other stuff would have had to happen in order for things to go right in the end.

Now I know why the people on set who are the most experienced seem the most relaxed. Mastering a job means putting challenges in perspective.